welcome

Enjoy the music. Previous post has info on the blog. Oh and don't forget to leave me some comments. I'd love to hear what you think; suggestions, etc.

2009 Shares, Requests, Recommendations

In Ile Oxumaré's first year I posted regular lists of what I was looking for. To my amazement, most of what I asked for was shared by generous readers. This year I'd like to do this a little differently. I'll list the things I'm still on the hunt for, but I'm opening this post up for random reader shares and requests. Here's some guidelines:
* For shares please try to keep them in the general scope of what you'd find on this blog: rare groove jazz/kozmigroov/spiritual jazz/eclectic & unusual jazzy-funky-progressive music.
* Do not steal other blogs' rips, though feel free to link to other blogs. If your rip is not original, that's okay, just say so. There's a lot of music out there from SoulSeek etc. that has long passed out of any one uploader's hands.
* Avoid posting material that is readily commercially available or recently reissued on CD. First, because the musicians we admire have the right to make money off their work, and second, to keep this blog out of trouble.
* Feel free to make and answer requests.
* I moderate comments. If you don't want yours published, just say so.
* I will consider, with permission, particularly special contributed items for full featured guest posts on the blog.
I'll keep this one post up for as long as practicable. Happy listening.
Aché-o.

Tina Turner Chants Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

Cassette tape snippet, date & circumstance unknown

I'm off shortly for a week's vacation in the warm waters of Puerto Rico with my boyfriend. Let me leave you with this remarkable short snippet said to be Tina Turner chanting the prayer of Nishiren Buddhism. It was tacked on to the end of a cassette given to me once, and I have ripped this short under 4-minute chant for your listening pleasure. There seems to be one unfortunate tape drag. I cannot vouche absolutely that it is rock/r&b superstar Tina Turner, nor offer any information at all about this recording's date or circumstances. This is of course not a particularly musical selection, but the voice and breath here has a resonating quality that is quite hypnotic. Her breath at the end is positively liberating. Perhaps a remixer among you can turn this into a spiritual jazz masterwork.

It's my understanding that devotees chant this mantra "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo" for spiritual and material fulfillment. Nishiren Buddhism has attracted numerous celebrity adherents including, I believe, Herbie Hancock. You can also hear Jon Lucien chant this mantra on his hit "Creole Lady" (offered here at Ile Oxumare) where he seductively entices his lady to chant with him to change their destiny.

Anyway I'm not sure what kind of computer access I'll have while away so comment moderation may be uneven...but keep them coming, keeps me inspired.

So, shall we chant and change our own destinies? See you in a week.

link in comments

Michael Jackson, RIP, Ibaye baye tonu

"How Does It Feel? When You're Alone And Cold Inside"--MJ, Stranger in Moscow

I remember when I first heard the Jackson 5. It was back in Chicago in the late 1960s, and they were so joyously infectious, and little Michael was the same age as me! He became the background noise of my youth and young adulthood, ever present. Sure by the late seventies I was a nascent jazzhead, but who didn't like the Jacksons? "Blame It On The Boogie," "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough," I remember the excitement I'd feel if I was entering a club and heard those songs playing over the distant dancefloor.

After I moved to New York City there was "Human Nature" and the unbelieveable world-gripping love-affair with "Thriller" and his absolute mastery of the human body through dance. Yeah I listened to my jazz and I was getting into New Wave but who didn't like Michael Jackson? I listened to "Bad" and was amazed at the technology of his sound. The last Michael I bought was "HIStory" and oh my God there he is singing the word "SHIT!"

I'm not really one for Disney-esque gloss and by then, well everybody loves Michael Jackson, but I stopped being so interested in his music and the "King of Pop" hype machine being stacked around him like so much plastic, so I probably can't name a single one of his songs since then. But he was always there, in the background.

And now, shockingly, he isn't. He's gone!

There is of course, the other Michael Jackson story, the one that began somewhere between his driven, task-mastering parents and that love song to a rat. The other story is the one where the adorable black boy grows into a strange powder-white not-quite-a-man, his face carved into unnatural shapes, and his reputation stretching the limits of belief. The weird Peter Pan obsession, the ugly theme-park garden estate, the sleeping with children, the peculiar marriages and strangely named children, the weird public faux-pas like babies being dangled off balconies, and the face and hair every year seeming stranger and stranger. His voice always a boyishly innocent falsetto, his singing evolved into an odd ritual of yelps and whoops.

I remember in New York City somewhere around the time his friend Diana Ross was trying to ingratiate herself to the citizens of our city in the early 1980s and she gave those unforgettable storm- and mob-plagued Central Park concerts (both of which I attended), there was an ugly ugly headline on a local African-American newspaper: "THE WHITE LADY AND THE FAGGOT." The white lady of course was Diana Ross and MJ was "the faggot" and I have long since forgotten why this now-defunct newspaper hated them and their friendship so much but it must have been a lifetime of dealing with such harsh judgments that pushed MJ so deeply into a unbreachably private life.

I hope in some way that the strangeness of MJ's last two decades was its own kind of hype. Was he happier than he seemed? I hope his family loved him and treated him well behind the walls of public persona. Was his world the lonely hard-edged place that seems to dominate the lyrics of "HIStory" or was it something filled with the joy of love and creativity and artistry?

It's always sad to lose one's musical idols, and the cost of living to middle age as I have done is outliving many of those responsible for my own life's soundtrack. Of course the music these amazing people created stays alive and ever-present. But as much as I have wondered in disbelief what the hell he was up to, I never thought Michael Jackson wouldn't be there in the background.

Goodbye Michael! Thanks for your music. Peace and blessings to you and all of those who loved you.

WTF??

I'm speechless. Michael Jackson dead?

Esther Phillips, All About Esther Phillips, 1978

Mercury LP, 1978
1 The Man Ain't Ready
2 Native New Yorker
3 You Think Of Him (You Think Of Her)
4 Pie In The Sky
5 S.O.S.
6 There You Go Again(There She Goes Again) Stormy Weather
7 Ms.
8 If I Fall In Love By Morning

Esther Phillips, voc
Harvey Mason, ds; Stephen Beckmeier, Roland Bautista, gtr; Nathaniel Phillips, bs; Bobby Lyle, keys; Victor Feldman, vibes, perc; Pee Wee Ellis, horn arrangements; George del Barrio, string and horn arrangements; Ernie Watts, fl, ts, as; Garnett Brown, trombone; Vance Tenort, congas; misc strings and horns; Jim Gilstrap, Stephanie Spruill, Myrna Matthews, Augie Johnson, BG voc
Produced by Wayne Henderson

This is for Hanimex who requested it in the Requests thread; and appears here thanks to the amazing Mellow, who has produced this pristine rip. This rip is a definite upgrade from the one previously available elsewhere in blogland.

Esther Phillips always strikes me as the saddest woman in r&b. Even though many of her songs were quite upbeat, and though she's always smiling in her photos, there's something deeply desperate and wounded about the persona that shines through them. An R&B teen star, pushed through blues, country and jazz toward the jazzy/funky side of R&B in the seventies via a string of albums on CTI/Kudu, Esther Phillips' penultimate chapter was a string of albums--now lost and unreissued--on Mercury after the end of her Kudu career. It will be remembered that Aretha Franklin won a Grammy award the same year Esther Phillips was up for one, and when Aretha won she handed the award straight to Esther as being the more deserving if unrecognized talent. That was for the Kudu album featuring her cover of Gil Scott-Heron's "Home Is Where The Hatred Is" where her own history of drug use pulls the song into a brutally truthful confession.

On Kudu, r&b/jazz producer Dave Matthews--fresh from his stint with James Brown--and other CTI arrangers took Phillips on a roller-coaster ride through the commercial trends of the seventies trying to fulfill Creed Taylor's slick vision of popular success. The disco moods of some of her adventures with Matthews are occasionally successful but often lifelessly formulaic. Although Matthews would return to produce Phillips' tragically awful final album "A Way To Say Goodbye" in 1984 on Muse, he's replaced here by the Crusaders' mastermind Wayne Henderson. Though Henderson had his own kind of formulas, also eventually marred by excess and sameness, 1978 was probably the zenith of his production talents and this album jolts Phillips' sound back to life with a slick blend of funkily adult r&b and jazz.

The studio musicians are the cream of the LA crop, and while this is certainly a highly produced piece of work, it's fresh sounding and catchy. On the cover of Odyssey's "Native New Yorker" (inferior to the original, it must be said) Phillips is oddly convincing when she sings "I'm no tramp but I'm no lady." Phillips had a voice from the blues, a shout with an edge far far away from, say, Sarah Vaughan's operatic instrument. It's the voice of a fighter, alternatively optimistic and fatalistic about life's trials.

Anyway Esther Phillips left this world too early, and it's a shame that her late seventies work has been ignored. I'm really proud to present this LP here, and please join me in thanking Mellow for his generosity.

link in comments

Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, Divine Songs, 1987

Avatar Book Institute cassette, 1987
"Accompanied by voices of students of The Vedantic Center"

1 Rama Rama
2 Keshava Murahara
3 Er Ra
4 Madhura Manohara Giridhari
5 Deva Deva
6 Chandra Shekara
7 Om Shanti
8 Rama Guru
9 Hari Narayan

Alice Coltrane, vocal, organ, synthesizer, harp on 3
Students of the Vedantic Center, vocal accompaniment and perc
Strings?

"Chanting is a devotional engagement, one that allows the chanter to soar to higher realms of spiritual consciousness. Chanting is a healing force for good in our world, and also in the astral worlds. Chanting can bring the person closer to God because that person is calling on the Lord. When one calls to even a friend, a mother, or any other relative in a kindly way, he gets the response, also in a reciprocal way." --Alice Coltrane/Swamini Turiyasangitananda in the original liner notes

Thus Alice Coltrane matter-of-factly states it: when you call out to a friend, you get a response; and so when you call out to God, you get a response as well. This extremely rare cassette recording is one of Alice Coltrane's calls to God. In the lyrics to "Om Supreme" on her first Warner Brothers album "Eternity," she was similarly up front, and I'm paraphrasing slightly: "When I call you to come to California, you know I will meet you in California. When I call you to the Divine realms, you know I will meet you there as well."

The first Alice Coltrane album I ever bought was her eye-opening 2-LP Impulse! anthology "Reflections on Creation and Space" back in the 1970s. My mind was blown by the music, and I didn't quite know what to make of the bits of what seemed at the very least a highly eccentric philosophy contained in her notes and titles. I was a young college student and not particularly spiritual at the time, and while I found her music irresistibly compelling I set aside its reference points. The cover portraits on this and the rest of her catalogue which I subsequently devoured always unnerved me: She seemed in those pictures unbelievably serene, almost like an iconic saint, if also distant, uncomfortably otherworldly, and frankly, a little kooky.

Now many years after my first encounter with her music, and, sadly now, a couple years after her passing, I have come to understand her a little better. Even though her Hindu spiritual path has not been a specific religious calling for me, the universality of her spirituality is clearly self-evident. I set aside my skepticism about her eccentricities and have come to understand that she was the real deal. Her consciousness indeed spanned the planes of being, and the music was a kind of teaching, not only another way of saying "if you call out to a friend you will get a response" but the actual shout out itself to both God and us, her listeners, her friends, seeking that response.

The music here is not jazz, though it is deeply soulful. Like her other devotional recordings it is mostly Alice Coltrane singing Sanskrit chants against various instrumental backgrounds. As with her later recording "Glorious Chants" also featured here at Ile Oxumare, there is a raw synthesizer whine on a few tracks but unlike that record it's less dominant overall. And her singing, still almost heartbreakingly soulful, is less tentative than it was on "Turiya Sings," also an Ile Oxumare first. On one song she plays her trademark harp. There are strings on many tracks; although the label doesn't credit live strings only synthesizers, they sound in places too sensitive to my ears to be entirely electronic.

The background vocals are mostly sparse and tasteful; there's a couple more rousing chorus-and-Indian percussion numbers that might make the casual listener a little more sympathetic to the robed Hare Krishnas still found occasionally here in NYC.

Take this music as it was meant: not as an artistic statement or bit of entertainment (though it is both), but as the evidence that Alice Coltrane was in fact some kind of sainted holy woman. It's not that this music will cure your aches and pains, protect you against swine flu, nor give you an "e-ticket" into the religious paradise of your choice; and nor should it convince you to give away your belongings and linger about in airports dressed in pastel robes, but let it be your proof that if you call out to the spirits of peace, and wisdom, and serenity, you will be answered.

Link in comments